Blue Magic (22 page)

Bodies. She was standing among the burned.

What about the judge?

“Clear the room!” she coughed, making for the bench. “Please, please …
Madre de Dios,
there’s his chair…”

He was behind the bench, sheltering one of the clerks with his body, a letter opener at the ready in his hand. When he saw Juanita, his wide face lit up.

“Everything’s all right, Billie.” He dried the clerk’s tears with the sleeve of his robe, pointing her at the exit behind Gladys. “No, go, don’t look back. It’s all right.”

“Are you okay, Your Honor?”

“Corazón, you’re never
ever
getting another day off.”

She covered her mouth, fighting a sob. “All those people.”

“Hush, Corazón, I know. Just get my chair, will you—”

A roar made them both jump. Down on the floor, Gilead was burning brighter than ever. There was that whumping gas-stove sound, and he became a ball of flame. Rising up to the ceiling, he burned his way out, up, rising into the sky and vanishing.

The fires were everywhere. Juanita pulled an extinguisher off the wall, spraying down the floor between the bench and the ramp to the exit.

The spooky Will Forest crouched near his wife’s charred remains. He was made of cinders now, of all the bits of fire rising from the floor.

Lethewood tried to speak to him; he brushed her off, vanishing. As her eyes came up, Lethewood focused on Juanita.

Oh, no. Not you too,
Juanita thought.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Leave me alone.” How had she become the go-to girl for all these freaks and murderers?

“We can help each other, Juanita.” She gestured at the back wall, and an archway grew there, a doorway of twisted thorns, green shot through with red and purple. Blackberries?

“I told you to go,” Juanita said.

“Think it over.” Lethewood disappeared. The arch stayed.

“Let’s keep it orderly, people,” boomed the judge. He had lifted himself back into his chair, and his voice calmed the remnants of the crowd.

Juanita scanned the room. The civilians had mostly evacced. The sprinklers had stopped the spreading fires, and Gladys had returned and awakened the unconscious marshals. A few MPs had even turned up, too late to do anything but pick up the pieces.

Pieces. All those bodies. She’d been standing … She had ashes on her shoes.

“Corazón?” The judge handed her a folded white handkerchief.

She took it automatically, staring past the crisped defendants to the main exit, where a chalky-faced General Roche was helping people limp out through the gaping, burnt doors. “He ordered me to let it happen, Your Honor.”

“We’re ants among giants, my dear,” Skagway told her, wiping his own face with the back of one immense hand. “And the giants are in no way wise, but mere children wielding magnifying glasses.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

HIS WIFE WAS DEAD.

Will shook off Astrid’s attempt to comfort him, making for his room.

Caro screaming, suffering—it had been quick, but by no means painless. Would the reporters air that? Was the execution already on the Internet?

Throwing herself in front of that wretched woman, tossing her life away, not a thought for Carson and Ellie …

He should tell them. Bramblegate would take him into dreams; he could meet with Carson.

Instead he sat, brooding. It was hours before someone got up the courage to knock on his door.

This is your fault,
he was going to say.
It was you, you who made Sahara a monster.
But when he opened up, he found Olive Glade, looking like she understood and holding a brandy flask.

“Is that whiskey?”

“I got Astrid to make a bottomless barrel of my great-granddad Elmo’s carrot wine.”

“Carrot wine.”

“I know—sounds mild. Don’t worry, it’s pretty much moonshine. Might make you blind, but it’s pleasantly sherry flavored. Elmo would throw any old thing that might ferment into a vat when he was making liquor.”

“I’m not sure I want company,” he said, nevertheless standing aside to let her enter.

“I get it, I really do.” She poured two cups and held one up in a toast. “The fallen?”

“The dead.” He clinked.

Sipping, she sat on the edge of his bed, eyeing the bits and pieces he’d accumulated since his arrival: toy elephants for Ellie, a couple pairs of socks, empty picture frames.

The alcohol was barely sweet and strong enough to burn a hole in a steel wall. They’d drunk two glasses before either of them spoke.

“It was over between us,” Will said finally. “She’d come to hate me. I was working on acceptance.…”

She looked amused. “Really?”

“Okay, I’d meant to work on it. Things have been…”

“Insane. Yeah. I’d been divorced twelve years, remarried too. But when Astrid killed Lee…” She pressed a hand to her chest.

Lee. Another Fyreman who had failed to kill Sahara. And Olive had lost more than one ex-husband. She was Albert Lethewood’s widow, Astrid got her son shot.…

He laughed harshly. “This is minimizing the body count?”

“Alchemites tortured that man, Will, not us.”

“Lucius. They only got him because I knocked him down.”

“You saved the strike team.”

“I didn’t join this crusade to kill people.”

“Who’ve you killed? That Fyreman murdered Caro.”

“‘That Fyreman’ who is Lucius Landon’s brother?”

“So it’s all your fault?”

He eyed her sourly.

“Or perhaps it’s Astrid’s?”

“Astrid broke the magical well open. Astrid unleashed Sahara, murdered Lee, got Jacks shot—”

“And her father stuck her with the well, and Jacks’s father killed Albert. Will, you didn’t make your wife join Sahara, and you certainly didn’t fry her.”

She said it kindly, but the word
fry
brought up the memory of Caro in flames. Shuddering, he gulped wine.

“What am I going to do, Olive?” He held out his cup.

She poured. “Believe Astrid when she says it’ll be okay.”

“It’s not even slightly okay.”

“No, it’s not—but what can you do?”

“Turn back time,” he said. “Bring the old world back.”

She toasted him with mock cheer. “Good luck with that.”

He bit back a heated response … and then his skin tingled. Vitagua was powerful.… It made anything imaginable a possibility, and he was a chanter now. Why not turn back time?

What if he changed the past? Say he saved Albert Lethewood—that would delay Astrid’s takeover of the magical well. If Albert lived, if Sahara never returned to Indigo Springs …

His heart raced. He’d tell Albert it was Lee Glade hunting him. Albert had been fifty-four when he died—he might have lived to seventy or eighty if he’d known.

Astrid had told Will all the details of the magical spill. Albert, Jacks, Lee—he could save everyone. Caro might leave him, but she wouldn’t die a fanatic.…

If he changed the past, they’d never brainwash his daughter.

“Where’d you go just now?” Olive asked.

“Ellie,” Will lied. “I need to find that padlock chantment, reverse the brainwashing so the children can come home.”

“Good idea.”

“I’ll start by becoming a better chanter,” he said.

“Do us a favor and sober up first.”

“You have me there,” he said. “Good night, Olive.”

She took the hint, leaving him to totter to bed, where he fell into a nightmare about the Roused, trapped in the frozen magic. He’d be betraying them too, not just Astrid and her volunteers. But they were asleep, peacefully asleep—safe. They could wait.

He saw Teoquan, black eyes burning with fury.

He awoke with a hangover, went to the bathroom to splash water on his face, and remembered anew that he had no running water. Instead of cursing, he croaked at the tuning fork hanging at his chest. “Pike, I need to start chanting things—toys.”

“Top of the mornin’ to you too,” came the reply. “Your workshop’s near the Chimney.”

“I have a workshop?”

“I make things happen, remember?”

“Thank you, Pike.”

He gated to the plaza, and stood for a moment blinking at Astrid’s bizarre little empire—the borrowed sunshine, people moving through Bramblegate, alchemized spiders spinning silkscreens to police the contaminated pollens, and everywhere the heavy flower-shop scent of liquid magic. People from every corner of the globe traveling to and fro, all of them giving him space because they knew his wife had died. They’d even shut down the plaza TV, going elsewhere for their fix of trial news.

Intolerable.

His “workshop” was on a new curl of fill on the other side of the Chimney, an open patio that overlooked the pooled vitagua in the ravine. A cluster of toys lay on its floor, and a huge glass punch bowl had been mounted on its edge. The bowl was filled with vitagua.

Will dipped a fist in the punch bowl, and the vitagua quailed away.

The ring. Easing it off, he was blindsided by memory: Caro, slipping it onto his finger at their wedding.

Caro, hat pulled low over a bad haircut.

Caro, burning.

Blinking hard, he began chanting toys.

He fell into a rhythm. Dip a finger, chant something, dip again. A shampoo bottle shaped like a TV cartoon character, a toy phone, a set of jacks, a stamp that made gold stars, a bracelet with bells on it, a toy gun, a plastic stove, a fake stethoscope, a pretend radio, a stuffed frog …

His hangover burned away. Clarity returned, intensifying his anguish over Caro, but giving him the strength to focus on his plan. Change the past. Get the old world back.

Volunteers turned up, bringing new toys, carting the chantments off.

Keep improving,
Will told himself.
Don’t let Astrid know you’re planning anything
.

He should find her—reassure her that all was well.

Forcing himself to slip the ring back on, he went in search of her. She was conferring with her head scientist, Katarina, inside the town’s Anglican cathedral. The building had been buried under the mulch of vitagua-infected wood, but the interior was sealed. Astrid had chanted its pipe organ. It was this—and a round-the-clock shift of musicians, who ran the communications center—sending out messages to volunteers via tuning forks and penny whistles.

The women were deep in conversation with an orange-haired, mustached stranger of about forty years, with a slouched posture and a shabby coat. The only thing at all notable about him was a red knitted scarf around his neck.
From somewhere wintry, then,
Will thought, summoning enough curiosity to consult the personnel wiki.

No answer. Will frowned. He’d gotten used to knowing everyone’s bio at a glance.

“Hey,” Astrid said before he could greet the stranger. Her voice was gurgly.

Something was off here. Astrid’s eyes were a solid, glowing blue, flooded with vitagua, and she wasn’t wearing the healing bangle that fought off the sea-glass poisoning. He lay a hand on her arm. Her skin was cold as frozen steel.

“Astrid?” he said warily.

“How are you doing?” it—whatever
it
was—asked.

“My wife is dead, my kids are … How do you think?”

“I never knew, Will.” There was no tongue inside that mouth, nothing but a blue cavity. “Caroline’s portrait wasn’t in the ballroom.”

“She couldn’t be saved,” Katarina said.

He stepped back. “What is this?”

“Mouse magic,” the orange-haired stranger said. He took off the red scarf, handing it to Katarina, and just like that, turned into Astrid. The other Astrid, the vitagua … clone?… froze to statue-stillness.

“This is my true self.”

“Astrid prime,” Katarina said. “Touch her.”

It wasn’t necessary: he could see that this Astrid was sick, could see too the healing bangle on her arm and the letrico flowing through it, keeping her alive. “I don’t get it.”

Katarina spoke: “Sahara’s possessing people using contaminated blood. It makes me wonder: Perhaps vitagua can act as a storage medium for human consciousness? It makes sense, if you consider the grumbles in the unreal. Astrid is in constant contact with the well, so—”

“Sahara copies herself using other people, and you … This is a copy of you?”

“Yeah. I didn’t want to infect anyone with my blood—”

“Because … ewww,” Katarina said. She tapped the frozen Astrid, nudging open the collar of its shirt and revealing a frozen, alchemized mouse.

Like the Roused,
Will thought with a pang of guilt. If he rewrote the past, they’d all be like that, as they had been for so many centuries already.

“Small chordates have skin cells, hair, brain cells, nerves, vocal cords,” Katarina said.

“Vocal cords. That’s why this copy of Astrid can talk?”

“Not just talk. I can see with this thing, Will. I can hear, and think.… It almost feels like me.”

His skin crawled. “Can it chant?”

“No.” Unexpectedly, she grinned. “But you can. You’ve made what? Twenty chantments today?”

“I wasn’t counting,” he lied. Each chantment took him closer to rolling back the calendar, restoring the world, saving Caro.…

Pike’s voice rang from the pipe organ: “Boss, they’re ready.”

“Be right there.”

“Ready?” repeated Will.

“The pipeline,” Katarina said. “Ribbon cutting’s today.”

“Right.” The Serbian mine engineer, Ilya, had used a tunneling chantment to sink a shaft down to a depth of forty feet. He’d beelined seventy miles northeast to a long-abandoned coal mine and flooded it with vitagua. There’d been no discernible effect on the already-contaminated forest.

Next they had eased a shaft outside the contaminated zone. They’d let five thousand gallons of vitagua seep into the rock, forty feet down. Again, there’d been no ill effects.

The underground dumping smacked of desperation to Will, but what did it matter if he was going to rewrite the past?